There's a growing body of research that finds taller people make more money.

The latest study, in Australia, found that being 6-foot tall brings
raises annual income nearly $1,000 compared to men two inches shorter.

"Taller people are perceived to be more intelligent and powerful," according to the study, published recently in the Economic Record.

"Our estimates suggest that if the average man of about 178
centimeters [5 feet 10 inches] gains an additional five centimeters [2
inches] in height, he would be able to earn an extra $950 per year -
which is approximately equal to the wage gain from one extra year of
labor market experience," said study co-author Andrew Leigh, an
economist at the Australian National University.

Other studies in the United States and Britain put the extra earnings at nearly that much per inch.

"The truth is, tall people do make more money. They make $789 more
per inch per year," says Arianne Cohen, author of "The Tall Book"
(Bloomsbury USA, June, 2009).

There's nothing else physically measurable about tall people that
explains the salary boost, however, Cohen explained recently on
American Public Media's radio program Marketplace. "They're not nicer.
They're not prettier. They're not anything else. But they've sort of
gotten a halo in society at this point."

Serious money over time

As the inches mount, the salary continues to, too.

Cohen's number is based in part on a 2003 review of four large U.S.
and UK studies led by Timothy Judge, a management professor at the
University of Florida. Judge and his colleague concluded that someone
who is 7 inches taller — for example, 6 feet versus 5 feet 5 inches —
would be expected to earn $5,525 more per year.

Height was found to be more important than gender in determining
income (though that claim is debatable, depending on how you analyze
the gender salary gap) and its significance doesn't decline with age.

"If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound
it, we're talking about literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of
earnings advantage that a tall person enjoys," Judge said then.

Being tall may boost self-confidence,
helping to make a person more successful and also prompting people to
ascribe more status and respect to the tall person, Judge said.

Of course all such studies generate averages. A shorter person can
certainly beat the odds, and not every tall person is raking it in.

Cohen, who is 6 foot 3 inches tall, says the pay advantage is conferred partly because taller people tend to exude leadership.

"Tall people tend to act like a leader from a very young age because
other children relate to them like a slightly older peer," she said on
the radio program. "In the workplace, when you're automatically acting
as a leader, that's really important when it comes time for promotion."

To some extent, then, the advantage of height may date back to youth.

A 2003 study of 2,000 U.S. men found that their height at age 16 had
a big effect on their salary as an adult, regardless of how tall they
ended up being. "We found that two adults of the same age and height,
who were different heights at age 16, were treated differently in the
labor market. The taller teen earned more," said study team member
Nicola Persico of the University of Pennsylvania.

Vertically challenged

All is not rosy on high, however.

In her book, Cohen notes that being tall can cost more, from
additional food requirements to costlier clothes and the desire for
outsized things like high-ceilinged homes. (Interestingly, there's a
growing debate about whether obese people should pay for their excess footprint on society and the environment, yet nobody is calling for taxing the tall.)

The average height for American men is about 5 feet 9 inches nearly
5 feet 4 inches for women. In more than a century, no U.S. president
has been below average height (the last one was William McKinley, at 5
feet 7 inches, and he was ridiculed in the press as a "little boy,"
Judge said).

Judge figures the advantages of height today are rooted in our evolutionary decision-making regarding who was most powerful.

"When humans evolved as a species and still lived in the jungles or
on the plain, they ascribed leader-like qualities to tall people
because they thought they would be better able to protect them," Judge
said. "Although that was thousands of years ago, evolutionary
psychologists would argue that some of those old patterns still operate
in our perceptions today."

In The Water Cooler, Imaginova's Editorial Director Robert Roy Britt looks at what people are talking about in the world of science and beyond.Find more in the archives and on Twitter.

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Author Bio

Robert Roy Britt

Rob was a writer and editor at Space.com starting in 1999. He served as managing editor of Live Science at its launch in 2004. He is now Chief Content Officer overseeing media properties for the sites’ parent company, Purch. Prior to joining the company, Rob was an editor at The Star-Ledger in New Jersey, and in 1998 he was founder and editor of the science news website ExploreZone. He has a journalism degree from Humboldt State University in California.